Urban Blight: The Modern Miasma

Max Michael

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

DEFINITIONS

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight

The process whereby a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. It may feature deindustrialization, depopulation or changing population, restructuring, abandoned buildings, high local unemployment, fragmented families, political disenfranchisement, crime, and a desolate, inhospitable city landscape.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Modern Miasma

Miasma comes from the Greek meaning pollution and was a theory that disease was caused by foul smelling air.Modern miasma refers to a condition responsible for an extensive cascade of other biologic, social, and economic consequences that may ultimately alter the genome through epigenetic effects which become heritable across generations.

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

The Modern Miasma

Social Consequences• ↑ Violence/incarceration• ↓ educational status• Single parent families

Economic Consequences• Poverty• Unemployment

Health Consequences• ↑chronic disease burden• ↑ infant mortality• ↓life expectancy

Impacts on Self-Identity• Fear and Loathing• Stress• Hopelessness

Urban Blight: The Modern Miasma• Disrupted neighborhoods• Loss of property values• Social Disintegration

Epigenomic Changes• Nucleic acid methylation• Histone modification• Nucleosome positioning Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

A STORY

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Neighborhood Leaders SurveyResults

1. Empty lots and abandoned homes2. Diabetes3. High school dropout rates4. High blood pressure5. Lack of sidewalks, walking trails and clean

parks

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Abandoned and Vacant Properties

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Thomas Jefferson Hotel: last rooftop zeppelin mooring mast in the world

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Birmingham’s Wake-up Call

• 49th largest metropolitan region in US• Global investors don’t know Birmingham• Major academic health center and university

essentially downtown• Innovation Depot and nascent innovation

district • Downtown buildings • Neighborhoods

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

ORIGINS OF URBAN BLIGHT IN BIRMINGHAM

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

1905 Chain Gang in SouthUrban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

URBAN BLIGHT: THE MODERN MIASMA

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

The Modern Miasma

Social Consequences• ↑ Violence/incarceration• ↓ educational status• Single parent families

Economic Consequences• Poverty• Unemployment

Health Consequences• ↑chronic disease burden• ↑ infant mortality• ↓life expectancy

Impacts on Self-Identity• Fear and Loathing• Stress• Hopelessness

Urban Blight: The Modern Miasma• Disrupted neighborhoods• Loss of property values• Social Disintegration

Epigenomic Changes• Nucleic acid methylation• Histone modification• Nucleosome positioning Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Abandoned and Vacant Properties

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

The Modern Miasma

Social Consequences• ↑ Violence/incarceration• ↓ educational status• Single parent families

Economic Consequences• Poverty• Unemployment

Health Consequences• ↑chronic disease burden• ↑ infant mortality• ↓life expectancy

Impacts on Self-Identity• Fear and Loathing• Stress• Hopelessness

Urban Blight: The Modern Miasma• Disrupted neighborhoods• Loss of property values• Social Disintegration

Epigenomic Changes• Nucleic acid methylation• Histone modification• Nucleosome positioning Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

The Modern Miasma

Social Consequences• ↑ Violence/incarceration• ↓ educational status• Single parent families

Economic Consequences• Poverty• Unemployment

Health Consequences• ↑chronic disease burden• ↑ infant mortality• ↓life expectancy

Impacts on Self-Identity• Fear and Loathing• Stress• Hopelessness

Urban Blight: The Modern Miasma• Disrupted neighborhoods• Loss of property values• Social Disintegration

Epigenomic Changes• Nucleic acid methylation• Histone modification• Nucleosome positioning Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

The Modern Miasma

Social Consequences• ↑ Violence/incarceration• ↓ educational status• Single parent families

Economic Consequences• Poverty• Unemployment

Health Consequences• ↑chronic disease burden• ↑ infant mortality• ↓life expectancy

Impacts on Self-Identity• Fear and Loathing• Stress• Hopelessness

Urban Blight: The Modern Miasma• Disrupted neighborhoods• Loss of property values• Social Disintegration

Epigenomic Changes• Nucleic acid methylation• Histone modification• Nucleosome positioning Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

map

125/192

45/109

16/42

62/94

80/129

48/66

4/31

Personal and Property Crime Rates55/90

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

The Modern Miasma

Social Consequences• ↑ Violence/incarceration• ↓ educational status• Single parent families

Economic Consequences• Poverty• Unemployment

Health Consequences• ↑chronic disease burden• ↑ infant mortality• ↓life expectancy

Impacts on Self-Identity• Fear and Loathing• Stress• Hopelessness

Urban Blight: The Modern Miasma• Disrupted neighborhoods• Loss of property values• Social Disintegration

Epigenomic Changes• Nucleic acid methylation• Histone modification• Nucleosome positioning Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Genetics and Urban Blight

Considerable epidemiological and experimental evidence in model organisms and, to a lesser

extent, in humans show that the consequences of environmental exposures and genetic variants

can be transmitted for at least several generations after exposure. Under these conditions,

establishing the origins of disease resulting from the action of genetic variants in ancestral

generations would be difficult to detect among affected individuals in a traditional genome-wide

linkage and association study. In addition to contributing to hypertension risk, heritable

epigenetic changes may accumulate across generations and could account for the dramatic

increase in hypertension, obesity, and related metabolic conditions.

Report of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Working Group on Epigenetics and Hypertension. Hypertension. 2012;59:899-905.

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Fear and Loathing“To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates. Between the World and Me

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Hopelessness“The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. … To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates. Between the World and Me

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

Stress“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates. Between the World and Me

Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma

The Modern Miasma

Social Consequences• ↑ Violence/incarceration• ↓ educational status• Single parent families

Economic Consequences• Poverty• Unemployment

Health Consequences• ↑chronic disease burden• ↑ infant mortality• ↓life expectancy

Impacts on Self-Identity• Fear and Loathing• Stress• Hopelessness

Urban Blight: The Modern Miasma• Disrupted neighborhoods• Loss of property values• Social Disintegration

Epigenomic Changes• Nucleic acid methylation• Histone modification• Nucleosome positioning Urban Blight.The Modern Miasma